C+
Genre: Historical: American, Literary Fiction
The Mad Girls of New York is a fictionalized retelling of the real-life reporter Nellie Bly’s breakthrough investigation into The Women’s Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. The novel is at its best when it sticks to the facts and when it keeps its focus on Nellie and women that she meets. It suffers when the attention shifts to a rival reporter, the fictional Sam Colton.
In both this book and in real life, Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane) moved to New York City in 1887 after working as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She finds herself unable to be considered for employment by any of the New York papers until she pitches a story to The World that only a female reporter can pull off. Nellie, working undercover, will get herself committed to the infamous Women’s Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, where she will investigate the asylum from within. She will be released by her employer after seven days and will write the story down. At least, that’s the plan.
As is often the case for me with historical fiction, I found the afterword to be the most interesting, since it covers this chapter of Nellie Bly’s real life and talks about the inspirations for supporting characters in the book. Nellie is a compelling character who meets a variety of interesting, strong-willed people, and her ordeal in the mental asylum is both horrifying and suspenseful. I was definitely swept along by the plot, even though I knew how things would turn out. Nellie’s efforts to get a job, and her efforts to land the asylum expose, are rendered in gritty but engrossing prose.
The book falters when it turns its attention to Sam Colton, a fictional rival reporter who appears to be set up as a love interest should this book become a series. I don’t know what Nellie’s love life was like except as regards her marriage (she married a much older man when she was thirty-one and shifted her attention from journalism to business). As far as the book goes, I felt that Sam’s involvement diminished Nellie’s efforts to make her own way, and I had no investment or interest in his character. The romance is limited to some flirting, a date, and mutual attraction, but it feels contrived and frankly patronizing. The real Nellie did not require dashing young men to assist her. She was fine on her own.
There’s also a side plot involving the mystery of what happened to the wife of a prominent citizen. This storyline is very loosely inspired by another Kickass Women, Elizabeth Packard. I wasn’t interested in the mystery, and I felt that the portrayal of the missing wife does an injustice to the indomitable woman that Packard actually was.
When this book sticks to what Nellie Bly actually did and experienced, it’s electric, because her life and experiences were incredible. The book does a great job with showing how her mental state deteriorates once she is admitted to the asylum, and why. In Nellie’s own, actual words, which are quoted in the novel:
“I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”
This frustration comes through loud and clear in the engrossing text of The Mad Girls of New York, which gives Nellie agency even as she feels increasingly desperate.
Above all, this novel succeeds when it portrays women talking to other women and falters every time it widens its gaze. As a romance fan, I love a good love story, but in this particular book the romantic angle simply doesn’t fit. I did not care about whatever Sam was doing and I resented being pulled away from Nellie, her fellow asylum inmates, and other female reporters that I did care about. Meanwhile, Bly’s real book, Ten Days in a Madhouse, is still makes for compelling, and tragic reading.
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Went a little higher with this at a B, but I agree Sam and the hinted possible romance between him and Nellie in future books was wholly unnecessary and he was clearly placed in the narrative to “add” tension that could’ve been easily milled from the fact that our heroine is in an asylum and dependent on a paper she’s just started working for to rescue her.
I don’t know if Rodale felt pressure to add the romance because she’s mainly known for the genre but Sam doesn’t work as a character, and trying to make him sympathetic was a no-go for me. It definitely made me want more time with the women she’d met in the asylum (Princess!), either way.
As soon as you said “fictionalized retelling of Nellie Bly’s investigation” I was wary. Intrigued, but wary. And my misgivings seem like they were accurate–we’re all Romance readers here, but personally I don’t like when a real-life historical figure is given a fictional romance in what is meant to be “their” story because it feels like taking too many liberties with a real person’s life. Things like “Abraham Lincoln Fights Zombies On the Moon” or whatever are fine by me because it’s clearly not an accurate retelling of history or the people who made history–if this novel was “Bettie Nye investigates the Victorian asylum and finds out the missing women are being brainwashed into an evil vampire coven,” sure. But especially to make a love interest who’s a male rival reporter when so much of the real story is a woman proving herself as a reporter, and in circumstances that so heavily revolve around women being controlled and silenced…it’s not going on my TBR, to put it like that.
Anyway, Ten Days in a Mad House is an excellent, though upsetting, read and is usually available for free online if you search for it.
As you point out in your review, the “real Nellie did not require dashing young men to assist her. She was fine on her own.” I wonder if the unfortunate implications you write about is because the writer had done so much research.
Lemme explain what I mean.
Maya Rodale must have done tons and tons of research about Nellie Bly before writing this book, and that must have given her a very clear and detailed picture of her. Readers like me, though, often don’t know a thing about Nellie Bly. (Well, I’m European. She might be more famous among people in the USA. In my country, the average person won’t even know about people like William Howard Taft or even Harriet Tubman.)
So to Rodale, there will always be a very clear difference between the real Nelly and the made-up one. To her, the real Nelly is the real person, and the protagonist of Rodale’s novel is a fictional character who’s only based on a real person. To Rodale, everything fictional in her novel is very clearly made-up.
But most people have no detailed knowledge of Nellie Bly, and the portrait of her and her life that we see in the novel is the only image we have. As far as we “regular people” know, almost everything in the book could be real, simply because we’ve never seen any clear sign otherwise.
(Granted, a large portion of the readers will be people who already have an interest in Nellie Bly, already have read a lot about her, and therefore have the ability to tell when stuff’s made up. But the rest of us just don’t have the knowledge to instantly tell what’s real and what’s made-up.)
So my point is, maybe to a writer, inserting stuff like that feels okay because the writer might think “We all know this part is fiction, so I’m clearly not suggesting this is what the REAL person did, only my fictional version of her.”
I dunno, could be I’m off-base here. I just have had this theory for a while, about how writers of historical fiction always know how very fictional their fiction is, and don’t understand that to a large portion of the readers, the writers’ fictional version of historical characters will be the only versions that those readers ever encountered. (Excepting intentional pieces of historical fiction written as propaganda pieces.)
Or maybe I’m way off-base. What do the rest of you think?
@Mikey it’s an interesting theory but I don’t personally believe it–I’m more inclined to say that a fiction writer doesn’t necessarily feel a responsibility to be “factual” while writing fiction, especially while writing about someone who’s been dead for long enough that no one currently alive remembers their exploits. The line between “historically accurate fiction” and “fiction that happens to involve historical figures/events” can be highly subjective; I’d wager most authors think that anyone who wanted complete accuracy would read nonfiction about the subject instead of/in addition to a novel, in the same way that movies & shows with historical settings aren’t documentaries* and shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s less a matter of the author assuming the audience knows which parts are fictional vs real, and more a matter of the author creating entertainment for the audience–in my estimation.
(*Documentaries don’t have to be accurate but you understand my meaning)
@cat_blue and @Mikey I think the issue with this one is that it both takes Not a Love Story History and adds a love story line AND is features a main character who is a real person with a known history. I’m fine with a fictionalization that takes a known historical relationship and “colors” the facts in, as it were, but this book sounds like it is drawing hearts on your college term paper to color them in, if that makes sense? In my opinion, if you are going to draw that far outside the lines, you have to choose the “Bettie Nye” option and acknowledge the source in the afterword. In the same vein, I don’t care as much if an author chooses a less public figure and uses Not a Love Story History as a backdrop (ala The Other Boleyn Sister).